A programmer's blog - will deal with everything that relates to a programmer. Occasionally, it will contain some humour, some politics and some sport news.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

The Turing Test - Can we ever pass it ?

Passing the Turing Test seems to the holy grail of AI researchers and considered as the ultimate test of machine intelligence. In this article, Mark Halpern argues that the basic principle of the test is flawed because the premise which Turing asserts to judge a "thinking computer" does not apply to fellow humans as "thinking beings". And regarding the achievements of the AI community, he quotes Maurice V. Wilkes, the winner of the Turing Award :

Originally, the term AI was used exclusively in the sense of Turing’s dream that a computer might be programmed to behave like an intelligent human being. In recent years, however, AI has been used more as a label for programs which, if they had not emerged from the AI community, might have been seen as a natural fruit of work with such languages as COMIT and SNOBOL, and of the work of E.T. Irons on a pioneering syntax-directed compiler. I refer to expert systems.... Expert systems are indeed a valuable gift that the AI community has made to the world at large, but they have nothing to do with Turing’s dream.... Indeed, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, in the 40 years that have elapsed since 1950, no tangible progress has been made towards realizing machine intelligence in the sense that Turing had envisaged.

1 comment:

You don't have to worry about passing or not. You just take it:...In Turing Test Two, two players A and B are again being questioned by a human interrogator C. Before A gave out his answer (labeled as aa) to a question, he would also be required to guess how the other player B will answer the same question and this guess is labeled as ab. Similarly B will give her answer (labeled as bb) and her guess of A's answer, ba. The answers aa and ba will be grouped together as group a and similarly bb and ab will be grouped together as group b. The interrogator will be given first the answers as two separate groups and with only the group label (a and b) and without the individual labels (aa, ab, ba and bb). If C cannot tell correctly which of the aa and ba is from player A and which is from player B, B will get a score of one. If C cannot tell which of the bb and ab is from player B and which is from player A, A will get a score of one. All answers (with the individual labels) are then made available to all parties (A, B and C) and then the game continues. At the end of the game, the player who scored more is considered had won the game and is more "intelligent"....